Do Individual Representatives Influence Government Transfers? Evidence from Japan1

Although the conventional wisdom is that representatives to the Japanese Diet are “pipelines” between the national treasury and local constituents, who have great influence over the distribution of central government transfers to and within their districts, the systematic empirical evidence that this influence exists is relatively weak. This paper uses two identification strategies to estimate how much individual Lower House Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) incumbents influence the distribution of government transfers during the period 1977 to 1992: 1) the exogenous change in representation following the midterm deaths of Japanese representatives; 2) the discontinuity surrounding elections where LDP candidates win or lose by very narrow margins. Overall, the influence of politicians on central-to-locality transfers is relatively small. However, the presence of a marginal LDP incumbent leads to about a 10% to 30% increase in per capita central government transfers to the municipalities where the incumbent has substantial electoral support.